God is love, and the light of this love is the true sourse of my artistic inspiration. The object of my artistic reflection os man and nature, a creation of God, standing on the earth while his soul is directed towards heaven, in a liberated pursuit of the origins of the world or one's own being, truth uninhibited by death.
           The idea of man, as an embodiment of the close interrelationship of flesh and spirit, imbued with the spark of divine love, and the idea of the sanctity of matter, the union and the divinity of the entirety of creation suggest the subjects of my work (which frequently occur to me in my dreams), as well as the manner of expression and their realization. In this sense I feel a kinship with artists of the Renaissance - Raphael, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Jan van Eyck, Van der Weyden, etc., who did not substitute the spiritual beauty of man for physical beauty, but who endowed the material world with a spiritual significance. This is the world of divine beauty and a harmonious reflection of eternity. A passionate urge to attain this wholeness or simply a hope of this possibility drives me to work. For menot only the concept of the painting is important, but each millimetre of the canvas, each of which is a constituent particle of the overall concept. Therefore, in order to achieve the expression of an idea I use models, objects, photographs, the fantasy of imagination and the lessons of the Old Masters together with my own acquired experience.
           It may be that I am not ambitious enough to be a professional artis, in the sense that everything which lies outside of the pure creation of my paintings - exhibitions, competitions etc. - is Iouri's domain of activity. For me,  my greatest accomplishment will be when I myselfperceive a ray of God's love brought to the world in my own work. Perhaps sometime in the future this will occur.
          As concerns contemporary art in general, it seems to me that now, more than ever before, contemporary art faces the challenge to realize that Christianity grants freedom and liberates creativity, because the path of truth for humanity is Christ.